Why Our Brains Tell Us There Is A God

All of us science-based thinkers know how difficult it is to dissuade people from accepting their intuition over the findings of science. There is no greater example of this than the issue of claiming God communicates with us personally/one-on-one. The last segment of a recent podcast from the Freedom From Religion Foundation focuses on the latest information on the subject by interviewing scientist and author John C. Wathey about his new book, The Phantom God: What Neuroscience Reveals about the Compulsion to Believe: "Wathey argues that the feeling of God’s presence is spawned by innate neural circuitry, similar to the mechanism that compels an infant to cry out for its mother. In an adult, this circuitry can be activated under conditions that mimic the extreme desperation and helplessness of infancy, generating the compelling illusion of the presence of a loving, powerful, and all-knowing savior. When seen from this perspective, the illusion also appears remarkably like one that has long been familiar to neurologists: the phantom limb of the amputee, spawned by the expectation of the patient’s brain that the missing limb should still be there."

Click on the link below for the podcast segment (timestamp approximately at 25:00):

Phantom God

Are You Self-Aware Of HOW You Understand Reality?

Self-Awareness: how an individual consciously knows and understands their own character, feelings, motives, and desires. (Wikipedia)

One of the most difficult actions humans can take is to look at ourselves from the outside as others may see us without giving in to some of the cognitive biases that all of us tend to have. Some categories of opinions on reality that one can include in self-awareness are politics, economics, history, religion, and medicine.

In these, and other areas, are you forming your opinions to conform to "what you are taught?", or, do you question the claims of relatives, friends, religious organizations, political parties, and the media to which you are exposed? Is comfort or knowing the truth more important? 

What tools do you use to decide what is true: 

• personal feelings/intuition/revelations
• objective evidence

Only one of these two can be justified/verified in understanding reality: the latter (the findings of science). If you think that the former is knowledge in the same sense as science, this link will educate you.

Religious Intuition: It's Natural

One of the most common apologetics for God and religion is the fact that such is universal in all human societies. Does that support the claim that, therefore, there MUST be a reality of a God behind it? Ah, no. The claim is just another example of the Argument from Ignorance/God of the Gaps. Below are two articles that clearly support the claim that religion and a belief in God are natural and evolved from pre-human animals, God is not necessary:

How and why did religion evolve?

Do humans have a "religious instinct"?

Science Is Not Intuitive

"When science is discounted based on ideology, we all lose. But when science is accepted based on authority or tradition, instead of critical thinking and evidence, we also lose. We must be both skeptical and open to new ideas and experiences to make progress. And as Richard Feynman said, 'The first principle is that you must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool.'"

 http://discountedscience.blogspot.com/2015/01/preface.html

Intuition